Judging by the swagger, there’s no doubting which world leader walked out a winner from the G-20 summit in St. Petersburg. Hint: It wasn’t Barack Obama.
Just in case the message wasn’t clear, Russian host Vladimir Putin added to his bluster by dispatching four warships to the Mediterranean, with promises of more to come. In direct talks with Obama on Friday, he refused to back down on Syria.
The most shocking thing about all this is that the Obama White House seems to have found it all . . . shocking. On Thursday Obama’s woman at the United Nations, Samantha Power, seemed frustrated that Russia was checking our ability to do anything at the UN. This from the woman who has made a career of raging against prior administrations for offering nothing but expressions of outrage in response to global atrocities.
The president was no better. Last year, he mocked Mitt Romney for suggesting that Russia was an enemy of the United States. But two years after he said Bashar al-Assad must go, one year after he declared that any Syrian use of chemical weapons would be a game-changer, he can’t even get the British to back him, let alone the Russians.
Of course the Russians won’t go along. Putin is one of Assad’s mentors. And of course the United Nations won’t help. Assad’s mentor has a veto in the Security Council.
The standoff between Putin and Obama underscores two truths the president has never faced up to. First, the United Nations is nothing without a resolute United States.
Second, it’s not only Damascus that’s looking to see if Obama follows through on his red line. It’s also Moscow — and Tehran, and a whole lot more to come if the president doesn’t do what he says he needs to and take that Syrian tyrant and his Russian godfather down a notch.